Ever since the industrial revolution, humans have increased efforts to invent countless "labor-saving" devices and technologies. Whether it is the microwave, the computer, or AI (artificial intelligence), the goal has always been the same: give humans more time to "relax" and do nothing.
This goal has been accelerated in recent years with the development of AI, with the new goal to even save humans the effort of "thinking."
Long gone are the days scouring the shelves of a library, or even talking to a wise old person. In fact, you don't even have to learn how to write well. Just click a button and your obvious mistakes will be transformed to make it seem that you are a literary sensation.
No longer is any effort required to be human in the world. It's time to sit back, relax, and let the robot do the dishes.
However, as with all things, just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should.
Dignity of work
What we often forget is that much of Jesus' life was under the guidance of St. Joseph, where he learned the craft of being a carpenter. Jesus only spent three years in public ministry, while the rest of his time was likely fixing people's homes.
St. John Paul II wrote an entire encyclical on the dignity of work, and highlighted the wok of St. Joseph and his son, Jesus:
For Jesus not only proclaimed but first and foremost fulfilled by his deeds the "gospel," the word of eternal Wisdom, that had been entrusted to him. Therefore this was also "the gospel of work," because he who proclaimed it was himself a man of work, a craftsman like Joseph of Nazareth. And if we do not find in his words a special command to work -but rather on one occasion a prohibition against too much anxiety about work and life - at the same time the eloquence of the life of Christ is unequivocal: he belongs to the "working world," he has appreciation and respect for human work.
Work is not something to be avoided, but is in fact part of human life, and even "divinized" with the coming of Jesus Christ. God did not avoid work, but freely accepted it and spent most of his time on earth doing manual labor.
St. John Paul II also comments on the new challenges of technology and how it can sometimes be man's "enemy:"
[I]t is also a fact that, in some instances, technology can cease to be man's ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work "supplants" him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave.
More and more we are becoming slaves to AI, feeding it all of our information and building massive data centers that often do more harm than good to the local environment.
We need to step back and reflect on work and its dignity before we give up all of our faculties, letting robots do everything for us, robbing us of what makes us human.
